Author Archive: Nikki Mather

Since SoftLayer's merger with The Planet in November, we have been working tirelessly to combine our legacy Orbit and SoftLayer customer portals, and we've got some great news: We're ready to move all of our billing information and functionality onto the SoftLayer platform! The changes are designed to make managing your account quicker and easier. While change isn't always welcome, when you see some of the new features and functionality in the SoftLayer billing portal, we're sure you'll be as excited as we are.

Once your Orbit account's billing information is migrated to the SoftLayer portal, you will receive an email confirmation. As soon as you're ready to start exploring the new system, you can log in at http://manage.softlayer.com with your master username and password. We recommend you use the master username to log in because some users may have access restrictions in the portal, and you need to be logged into a user that has accounting access. Once you are logged in, click on the "Administrative" tab near the top-left of your page. From the drop-down menu, you will choose “Accounting" to bring you to the billing-related section on your account.

Wait ... Instead of just guiding you through the process via text, how about we walk you through a quick tour of the billing portal as a bit of show-and-tell?

In the Accounting section, you can retrieve invoices, check pricing and even see your next monthly invoice. As a legacy Orbit customer, you'll also be happy to hear that when your billing information is moved to the new portal, PayPal is available as a payment method! Among other changes, you'll also note that we have a One-Time Payment option to enable some flexibility in how your account is paid in a given month.

In the new system, you'll also notice that order reconciliation is made much simpler. You can easily view invoices by type, date or status. You can even view invoices within a specified date range and save invoices in interactive PDF or Excel formats. Updates to your user and payment information are much more accessible, too.

Our interactive invoices make it much simpler to review your equipment and the costs on your account. The interactive PDF will give you a summary of all charges broken down by type and then by server. If you click on any one of your servers, you are instantly taken to the full pricing detail of that server by component. If you have any items not listed under a server on your invoice you can use our Associate Billing Orphans section to attach unassociated items to a server.

With these invoices, you can track your costs and equipment clearly to make sure the right gear is getting charged the right amount. You can even use our Show Next Invoice feature to project costs for the following month!

We hope you'll be amazed at all the features you now have at your fingertips! Please give us your feedback so we can be sure all questions are answered!